Given a chance to cut back on future leaks, the Senate balks: The U.S. Senate has refused to protect whistleblowers in intelligence agencies. The Senate last week passed a markedly different version of whistleblower protection legislation than the U.S. House of Representatives had previously approved, resulting in a call by one congressman for the creation…

To say that I am on the anti-secrets-publication bandwagon would be something of an understatement, but while listening to various editors and reporters on the radio talking about the rightness or wrongness of revealing classified material during a time of war (which is a debatable point in some circles), a couple of questions occurred to…

Nearly five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security continue to clash over who is in charge of coordinating and vetting information on terrorism. As a result, state and local authorities continue to get conflicting or incomplete information – sometimes none at all – on threats inside the United…

. . . so little privacy: Almost every piece of personal information that Americans try to keep secret — including bank account statements, e-mail messages and telephone records — is semi-public and available for sale. That was the lesson Congress learned over the last week during a series of hearings aimed at exposing peddlers of…

You will probably only find it in a second-hand bookstore (I found mine in Ottawa), or you can wait a month and maybe Amazon will be able to find a paperback version for you, but a great book on a fantastic intelligence success is The Double-Cross System by Sir J.C. Masterman. The short version: British…

Pesky details courtesy of Captain’s Quarters: I think that we have known of a handful of recovered chemical-weapons shells, but not 500. That number has more significance. An artillery company could have laid down a very effective attack on an enemy position, quickly killing or disabling them in a manner outlawed for decades. Of course,…

First, in light of recent events and because I am a good steward of the virtual planet, allow me to recycle this post as well as this one. Second, and at the risk of beating a dead horse, could we please stop with rating from privacy advocates about how government investigation into large pools of…

A former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst has pleaded guilty to illegally holding classified documents and admitted in a plea agreement to passing “top secret” information to Chinese intelligence officials. Ronald N. Montaperto, the former analyst who held a security clearance as a China specialist at a U.S. Pacific Command research center until 2004, pleaded guilty…

Consider: Seven radical (black) Muslims arrested in Miami Mid-2005 Population of black men between 20-39 in US prisons: ~ 500,000 (DOJ BJS) In 2004, # Muslim men in just federal facilities ~9,000 (DOJ OIG) % of Muslims in federal facilities who declare affiliation with Sunni or Nation of Islam: 85 All elephants are gray, but…

That’s what we can call subsequent terrorist attacks. Don’t I mean intelligence failure? No, because by all accounts intel is doing everything it can to keep us safe without imposing the “papers please” environment fear-mongers would have you believe we are marching towards. By its own admission there is nothing wrong or illegal about the…